Josef Mengele: These are the atrocities committed by the Angel of Death from Auschwitz

The bloody history of the twentieth century does not remember a darker medical figure than the cruel Josef Mangala. When Mengele arrived at the Auschwitz extermination camp in 1943, he arrived not only as an officer in the monstrous Nazi army, but as a scientist who sought to turn the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people into a platform for distorted genetic research. The cruel Mengele stood on the train platform in Auschwitz Birkenau, dressed in a polished uniform, and with a light movement of his hand sent masses of Jews to their immediate death in the gas chambers. Meanwhile, he scanned the frightened crowd with cold eyes looking for twins, dwarves and people with rare physical disabilities. For him, these people were not human beings with feelings or rights, but raw materials in the monstrous human laboratory he set up inside the death camp. He saw the Jews as biologically inferior creatures, a belief that was at the heart of the evil Nazi ideology, and used his power to commit unpardonable crimes against them.

The experiments on the twins were the central focus of his monstrous activity. The cruel Mengele believed that if he succeeded in deciphering the genetic secret of the birth of twins, he would be able to help Leo women give birth to double the number of children and thus ensure the supremacy of the Nazi race. The children chosen for his experiment were given seemingly special treatment, they were not sent to hard labor and received better food, but the medical treatment they received was a continuous series of tortures.

The cruel Mangala injected chemical substances into children’s eyes in an attempt to change their color to blue, an action that caused excruciating pain and blindness among 100% of the victims who went through the gruesome process. In other cases, he performed surgeries without anesthesia to study the twins’ internal organs while they were still alive. When some of the children died as a result of the cruel experiments, Mengele ordered the other twin to be murdered as well so that he could perform a post-mortem on both and compare the findings.

Mengele’s cruelty knew no bounds even when he was engaged in researching diseases. He deliberately injected pathogens such as typhoid and tuberculosis into the bodies of healthy prisoners to monitor the rate of spread of the disease within the human body. Although doctors are supposed to save lives, the brutal Mengele acted as a mass murderer in a white coat. He collaborated with German pharmaceutical companies that wanted to test experimental preparations on humans, when the results of these experiments were almost always fatal. When an epidemic broke out in a certain block in the camp, the monstrous doctor’s solution was not medical treatment, but sending all the residents of the block to the gas chambers immediately. This attitude characterized the entire brutal Nazi system, which saw human life as a consumable resource that could be destroyed as soon as it became a burden or unnecessary for the system.

The story of the Ovitz family, a family of seven short people who were stage performers, illustrates the capriciousness of the monstrous doctor. The cruel Mangala discovered a morbid academic interest in them and decided to keep them alive for his research. He subjected them to a series of invasive and humiliating tests, during which he took huge amounts of blood from them and performed multiple X-rays on them without any protection. Despite the torture, the family members survived the war, but they were left scarred for life from the encounter with the person who represented absolute evil.

Mengele felt no empathy for his victims, and he recorded all his crimes in cold blood in thick notebooks where he detailed the measurements and results of his monstrous experiments.

When the Soviet army approached Auschwitz in January 1945, the villainous Mengele realized that his time was limited. He collected his incriminating documents and escaped from the camp, managing to disappear in the chaos of the end of the war. For several years he lived in Germany under an assumed name and worked as a farm laborer, but the fear of prosecution caused him to flee to South America in 1949. With the help of networks of other brutal Nazi criminals, he managed to reach Argentina and from there to Paraguay and Brazil. Throughout his years on the run, Mengele never expressed remorse for his monstrous actions. In his personal diaries that were later revealed, he continued to justify the genocide and the cruel experiments he carried out, even though the whole world already knew about the extent of the atrocities that took place under his command in Auschwitz.

Mengele moved from place to place, changed names and lived in hiding apartments, but managed to escape the hands of his pursuers time after time. Luck played in this monstrous man’s favor until the last moment, and he was never brought to trial for his crimes against humanity.

The legacy of the cruel Mengele continues to preoccupy the world of medicine and ethics to this day. His monstrous experiments led to the formulation of the Nuremberg Code, which for the first time established clear rules for the protection of participants in medical experiments. To note that the most important lesson from his actions is the understanding that science without compassion and morality is a deadly weapon. The brutal Nazi doctors proved that even highly educated people can commit the most heinous crimes when operating within a system that encourages hatred and dehumanization of the other. Today, in every medical faculty in the world, students learn about Mengele’s crimes as part of their ethical training, to ensure that a professional never again abuses his power in such a horrific way.

The survivors who survived the encounter with the monstrous doctor continue to tell their story, despite the unbearable pain involved. Although Mengele escaped physical punishment, history forever branded him as one of the vilest men to ever walk the face of the earth, a doctor who betrayed the Hippocratic Oath and became a symbol of death and destruction.